How Can Believers Understand the Scriptures?

The Illumination of the Holy Spirit

Scripture clearly teaches that humans can know God, and are therefore accountable for not worshipping him.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Rom 1:19–20 ESV)

Being without excuse, Jesus regularly reprimanded the Pharisee’s for not knowing the Scriptures. He reprimanded them because they ought to have know what God said. For example, when teaching Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit, Jesus responded to his questions:

“Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 3:10 ESV)

Or, when questioned, Jesus regularly said “have you not read…” implying that, simply reading the Scripture, they should have understood.

““And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”” (Mark 12:26–27 ESV; see also Matt 12:3–5; 19:4; Mk 12:10)

Jesus chastised the disciples for being “foolish” and “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Lk 24:25 ESV).

So it seems to be clear, that people can and should understand the Scriptures.

And yet, Scripture also teaches, that there are many things that unbelievers cannot understand (see here), spiritual truths that require the Spirit to understand.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Cor 2:14 ESV)

Jesus plainly states that only his sheep can believe what he says:

“but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep.” (John 10:26 ESV)

There are other passages that indicate that we need our minds opened to understand the Scriptures. It was not until Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, opened the mind of the disciples could they understand the Scriptures. It appears we need outside, divine help. This help has been called the illumination of the Spirit and occurs when a person is born again and ongoing throughout the Christian’s life.

“Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45 ESV; see also Eph 1:18 which mentioned Christians “having the eyes of your heart enlightened.”)

So which is it? Can unbelievers understand the God’s Word? Or can they not? And what do we mean by “understand”? Are we saying that unbelievers cannot even understand the sentences of the Bible? Or do we only mean that unbelievers can understand the Scriptures, they just reject it?

At this point it is helpful to lay out levels of “understanding.” John Feinberg’s treatment of “understanding” will be largely followed, slightly simplified, below.¹

Levels of Understanding

If we need illumined to understand (whether that is to understand the meaning of a text, texts, or doctrine of Scripture, or to understand how to apply the text theoretically or practically), what types of understandings are there?

1. The first is simply intellectual understanding. This includes (1) understanding sentences, but it also includes (2) understanding Christian doctrine, which is a synthesis of what the Bible teaches, including (3) understanding the unified story of the Bible.

For example, Paul says that Christ died “in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3–8). There is no single verse you could point to, but multiple verses rightly understood result in understand Christ as the Messiah, God-man, who died in our place for our sins.

At this point is it noteworthy to point out that evil the devil “believes” in God. It is possible that the devil “understands” a lot more about God than you or I do. So such an “understanding” does not result in salvation, obedience, or allegiance to God.

“You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19 ESV)

It also would seem that illumination, at least for fallen angels, is not needed to understand certain things about God.

2. The second level of understanding moves beyond intellectually understanding the Bible and also understanding the application of the text. This includes both, (1) what the text means to the original audience, or the principle taught in the text in addition to (2) how the text specifically applies to you in your unique context. Note at this point, all understanding is still cognitive. It does not guarantee that the person will respond in accord to their understanding.

3. The third type of understanding builds upon the first two. This level of understanding results in not just knowing cognitively the content of what the Scriptures teach and the appropriate response to the teaching of Scriptures. Once a person understands at this level, they understand the veracity of the claims and are moved to respond with obedience.

For example, if I tell you your house is burning down. You might understand intellectually (understanding 1) the content of what I am saying—so long as we speak the same language–you may also understand the theoretical principle (e.g. people should not stay in burning buildings) and the personal application (understanding 3)(e.g. get out of your house!), but you may reject what I am saying as false and go back to bed.

What Does the Illumination of the Spirit Do?

So what level of understanding—so to speak—does illumination provide? Minimally, it is clearly true that unbelievers can largely understand what a text of the Bible means. “The unbeliever “knows” the facts of the gospel, perhaps, but he does not see the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”² Moreover, on the one hand we could say that the Pharisees actually killed Jesus because they understood him! They heard him claim to be the Son of God and hated that truth and so they killed him. As Feinberg notes, “such a strong rejection doesn’t come from people who hear but understand absolutely nothing.”³

It is also clear that it is a work of the Holy Spirit in saving a person, and removing the “veil” as Paul says (2 Cor 3), so they can see the light of the gospel and respond with obedience, loving the light and no longer loving darkness. Illumination must include this level (level 3 above) of understanding.

However, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus opened the mind of the disciples to understand “all that the prophets have spoken” in that “Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Lk 24:25­–26 ESV). There are not many, if any, explicit individual verses in the Old Testament that teach the Messiah will come, be rejected, and die for the sins of the people. But, when many/all the verses in the Bible are “put together” correctly, one can see this picture. Feinberg summarizes that Jesus didn’t “present any information they didn’t already know. He helped them see it in a different way so that they “got” how it fit together and what it all meant.”⁴ This still relates to an intellectual understanding, but it appears the Spirit is necessary to illumine our minds to see how it all fits together. Thus, the illumination of the Spirit is necessary to help us intellectually understand how the Bible all fits together.

Furthermore, beliefs such as belief in God, creation of the world, etc. have massive implications upon our worldview and understanding of the world. If we reject God, our understanding of many/all other things will not be entirely accurate at some level. Feinberg rightly states illumination helps with “understanding revelation, including both natural and special revelation.”⁵ We need illumined to understand all revelation including natural revelation. This does not mean that unbelieving doctors and scientists cannot understand anything, but there is a level in which their understandings are faulty by rejecting God.

So, while the illumination of the Spirit certainly is necessary for us to respond rightly (understanding 3 above) to the text of Scripture, illumination can also extend to intellectually understanding (understanding 1 above, whether that be a single verse or how to “put it all together”). Plummer argues that to only understand illumination as relating to the ability to respond rightly to the text “does not take seriously the noetic affects of the fall (that is, how sin distorts the human thought processes).”⁶ And while not detailing specifically what this could look like, Keener allows that the Spirit can in fact “be active even on the level of exegesis, most often through the clear functioning of our cognitive faculties.”⁷

8.1.3 Ongoing Illumination in the Life of a Believer

So, while illumination certainly refers to the Spirit’s work in allowing one to respond rightly to God’s word, initially at salvation and in an ongoing way as a disciple who obeys his/her master, it also refers to a Christians ongoing need for the Spirit’s help to intellectually understand more and more of, and in more depth, God’s revelation.

We need to be “transformed by the renewal of our mind” (Romans 12:2). When we come to Scripture we should always be praying to God for the Spirit’s help to continue to illumine our redeemed, yet still affected by the fall, minds. As the Psalmist says:

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” (Psalm 119:18 ESV)

It is also true that, as a Christian, to have unrepentant or hidden sin in our lives continues to darken our minds. Paul said to the Corinthians, whom he called saints (1 Cor 1:2), that he could not speak to them as “spiritual” but as “people of the flesh” and “infants in Christ” (1 Cor 3:1 ESV) because they were “behaving only in a human way” due to their sin (1 Cor 3:3). Thus, a Christian may not understand the Bible, may require further illumination, because they have ongoing sin in their life. Of course, all Christians have sin, but the Corinthians were not naming their sin as sin, but were giving themselves to it.

1. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place, 567–619. Feinberg in turn is relying heavily on Kevin Zuber’s dissertation What is Illumination?

2. Piper, A Peculiar Glory, 141.

3. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place, 596.

4. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place, 595.

5. Feinberg, Light in a Dark Place, 572.

6. Robert Plummer, 40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2021), 160.

7. Craig Keener, Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 12.